Introducing the Status Bar

The Status Bar is a thin strip located at the bottom of the
PowerPoint 2013 interface as shown highlighted in
red within Figure 1. This area provides information about the active slide, and also provides
several View options.

To work with options in the Status Bar, you must have a presentation open in PowerPoint -- otherwise the options within the Status Bar will be
grayed out.

Status Bar Contents

Let's explore some components of the Status Bar -- Figure 2 marks some of these components so that we can refer to them in the
explanations below:

Figure 2: Status Bar components

Note: Is your PowerPoint 2013 Status Bar orange in color? Yes, the
orange can be quite glaring in appearance! The Status Bar that you see in Figure 2, above is grey in color because we
changed the interface color to grey from the
default orange color -- this updates the color of the Status Bar too.

Slide: This displays the active slide number, as well as the number of slides in the open presentation.

Comments: This again is a toggle button that opens and closes the Comments
Task Pane.

View Buttons: Here you can select the appropriate buttons to switch to the Normal, Slide Sorter, Reading or Slide Show views. Shift-click the same buttons to access the Slide Master
view, Handout Master view, and the Set Up Show dialog box.

Zoom: Pull the slider left or right to zoom in or out, or click the zoom level to bring up the Zoom dialog
box as shown in Figure 3 -- here you can specify the zoom level.

Figure 3: Zoom dialog box

Fit slide to current window: Click this button to fit the slide in the available
Slide Area.

You can customize what appears on the Status Bar by right-clicking on the Status Bar and selecting or deselecting the options in
the Customize Status Bar menu (see Figure 4).

Have your ever used keyboard shortcuts and sequences in PowerPoint? Or are you a complete keyboard aficionado?
Do you want to learn about some new shortcuts? Or do you want to know if your favorite keyboard shortcuts are documented?